In an effort to continue investigating ongoing breakdowns denying borrowers access to Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the Student Borrower Protection Center uncovered thousands of pages of documents from the company the Department of Education (ED) contracts with to manage PSLF: the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA).
The documents show that ED and PHEAA have blocked thousands of people who clearly work in public service—including educators—from pursuing PSLF, often due to paperwork hurdles and other trivial administrative errors. Analysis of these findings indicates that these breakdowns derailed more than 4,500 educators at more than 2,700 schools in big cities and small towns in all 50 states and the District of Columbia from securing promised loan forgiveness.
The full set of documents uncovered is available here.
The central document of interest to our findings, a spreadsheet listing the various employers that workers have named when submitting denied paperwork on the path to PSLF and the reasons for denials, is available here.
Read more on the Student Borrower Protection Center’s work related to PSLF here.